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On today’s show, Duncan discusses the woes of clutter in the home and how a cluttered home can make you feel anxious, overwhelmed and even depressed. Information and statistics for today’s show were sourced from a paper written by Josh Fear who represents that Australia Institute. The title of Josh’s paper is “Stuff Happen - Unused Things Cluttering Up Our Homes. The Australia Institute is an independent public policy research centre funded by grants from philanthropic trusts & memberships. You can read the paper by going to their web-site which is located at www.tai.org.au.
This study is about the extent to which Australian homes are cluttered with things that are rarely or never used. A nationally representative online survey of 1,002 respondents was carried out in December 2007, and was followed up with a series of telephone interviews with people who identified themselves as having problems with clutter.
The findings show that 88 per cent of homes have at least one cluttered room, and the average home has three or more cluttered rooms. The spare room is the most
cluttered area in the home, followed by cupboards, the garage and bedrooms. Not surprisingly, people living in detached houses had more clutter than people living in townhouses or apartments, and people with kids in the home tend to have more clutter than those without. Victorian homes are the most cluttered, while New South Wales homes are the least cluttered.
Four in ten Australians say they feel anxious, guilty or depressed about the clutter in their homes. Women are much more concerned about clutter than men: almost half of the women surveyed said they were anxious, depressed or worried about the clutter in their home, while a third said they were embarrassed by it. Indeed, fully 59 per cent of women said there was a room in the house that they don’t like visitors to see because of the clutter.
Naturally enough, clutter tends to accumulate over a lifetime, with older people having much more than younger people and people who own their own home having
more than mortgagees or renters. However, younger people are more worried about their clutter, and more anxious to do something about it. Older people, by contrast, seem to have accepted or resigned themselves to their clutter, despite having more of it.
The research shows that many people – 84 per cent of survey respondents – are in the strange situation of having bought things in order to deal with the excessive amount of things they have bought. Around a quarter had even bought vacuum storage bags –which suggests that the stored items will not be in use for some time. One in five respondents had built a shed or garage to keep or store things, while one in eight had even moved house to accommodate their superfluous ‘stuff’.
There is an interesting term that has entered the vocabulary of financial counsellors and real estate agents in recent years: ‘Castle Hill syndrome’. It describes how some new home owners in outer suburban suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne find themselves facing ‘mortgage stress’, despite having reasonable and secure incomes.
People suffering from Castle Hill syndrome spend nearly all their disposable income on loan repayments, and their houses, often new McMansions built to convey the
appearance of wealth, remain largely empty because their owners can’t afford to properly furnish them after meeting their mortgage obligations.
There are other ways of spending one’s money that can seem just as misguided. According to a 2004 study by the Australia Institute, the average Australian household wasted $1,226 in that year on items that were purchased but never used. This equates to $10.5 billion across the nation – or more than Australian governments spent on universities and roads over the same period. As the study’s authors observed, cutting this wasteful consumption would be enough for the average mortgagee to protect themselves against a 0.75 per cent rise in interest rates.
This paper by Josh Fear is about the very opposite of Castle Hill syndrome: the excessive amount of ‘stuff’ that clutters up many people’s homes in an age of affluence. Rather than throwing away, recycling, selling or giving away the unwanted or unused things in our homes, we often let them accumulate. This could be because we are too lazy or too busy to deal with them; or it could be because we feel guilty for buying things that we don’t use but are unwilling to admit that their purchase was a mistake. It could even be that some of us are congenital ‘hoarders’ – that we have a natural instinct to accumulate things in case we need them one day.
There is an important difference between having a cluttered home, or ‘hoarding’, and the behaviour associated with wasteful spending. In Australia, as elsewhere, non-grocery shopping is increasingly undertaken for its own sake, regardless of whether the goods purchased are needed or wanted; indeed, modern shopping centre designs encourage consumers to linger as long as possible.
Spending money is now, strangely, its own form of entertainment. This obviously has a significant impact on the environment and (in a different way) the economy, but it also affects our homes. Psychologists have distinguished between the act of shopping (going to the shop), purchasing goods (the transaction) and consuming the goods after purchase. They have also noted differences between hoarding and shopping at the pathological end of the spectrum. Compulsive hoarding has been defined as ‘the acquisition of and inability to discard large numbers of possessions that clutter the living areas of one’s home and interfere with the ability to use the living spaces.’
Hoarding is considered ‘clinically significant’ when it ‘interferes with the ability to function effectively or produces significant distress’. Compulsive
buying, on the other hand, ‘involves excessive, uncontrollable, time-consuming, and repetitive shopping or buying in response to negative events and/or feelings, resulting in negative consequences such as social and financial difficulties.
It appears to be characterized by an irresistible urge to buy, and some form of tension relief or gratification, usually temporary, follows the purchase.
The actual items that constitute clutter are extremely varied, and depend on the circumstances and personalities in each household. Items commonly mentioned by those participating in phone interviews included clothes (to be repaired, thrown out, given away, or simply never worn), paperwork (including old letters, junk mail and old newspapers), books, and things for children (such as old toys or craft items).
Interview discussions also revealed a number of different categories of clutter, depending on the nature of a person’s ‘attachment’ to things:
• Emotional clutter – things with sentimental meaning but little financial value – including children’s toys or drawings, (unused or unwanted) gifts, school or university notes, and personal possessions of absent loved ones.
• Just-in-case clutter – things with little or no sentimental value but that ‘might come in handy one day’ and that are therefore kept for some time, such as old bills or bank statements, tools and stationery.
• Bought clutter – impulse purchases, often acquired recently, that end up never being used, commonly including clothes, fashion accessories and books.
• Bargain clutter – free or very cheap things acquired at sales, from friends or family or ‘by the side of the road’ which are discarded only reluctantly
because they were so cheap.
Karen Kingston - spaceclearing.com
Karen is a best selling author with over 2 million books - 22 languages - Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui & Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui.
Space clearing is the feng shui art of clearing and consecrating energies in buildings. It’s as essential to the energy maintenance of a place as physical cleaning is to the physical maintenance. Physical Grime, Predecessor Energy & Clutter.
Any kind of clutter creates an obstacle to the smooth flow of energy around a space. This in turn creates stuckness and/or confusion in the lives of the occupants. While the Space Clearing ceremony to clear predecessor energy can easily be accomplished in a few hours, the cleaning and clutter clearing aspects can take some folk a while longer. In fact, it is fairly common for me to hear from readers that they glided through the early chapters of my first book, came to the clutter chapter, and there the bookmark stayed for six months or more until they had done enough work to read on.
Someone once sent me a fascinating story that was published in a Finnish newspaper about an art student who decided to inventory every object in her 250 square meter home (that’s about 2,700 square feet) and present it as her final thesis. To do this she used traditional archaeological methods and discovered she owned a total of 6,126 objects. The most interesting part was her analysis of how often she used each object.
Never used objects - 1457
Objects used less frequently than once a year - 2209
Objects used once or twice a year - 1411
Objects used every month - 587
Objects used every week - 401
Objects used every day - 61
Put another way, 24% of the objects were never used at all and a further 59% were used only once or twice per year. That’s a ratio of 83% clutter. Of the remaining 17%, only 1% of the objects were used every day.
There is no reason to suppose that Finnish clutter hoarding habits are any different to the rest of the human race, but let’s suppose this art student was an extreme example. Even if she had twice as much clutter as a normal person, that would still mean that more than 40% of the average home consists of junk.
These statistics alone give pause for thought but now let’s add another dimension. Let’s look at the energetic effect of objects that are never or rarely used. Most people keep things because they believe they will come in useful one day, but in fact the stagnant energy that collects around unused things causes stagnation in the life of whoever owns them. So instead of being an asset, clutter is in fact a liability. That’s why people who have clutter are always stuck in their lives in some way. Perhaps you do not have the time or inclination to inventory the objects in your home but a quick stroll around will reveal whether there’s clutter or not. What’s your clutter ratio do you think?
Do you feel overwhelmed By Clutter? Where on earth do you start when attempting to clear clutter in your home? An old Chinese proverb says - A Journey of 1000 miles begins with just one step. Set time aside and start with 6 things or one problem article - old papers etc. Have a friend on standby to provide you with an objective outlook when you start to clear out your room of clutter. There are a lots of ways to get rid of clutter - perhaps you could sell old unwanted items on eBay, donate to a Charity, deposit old unwanted clothing into charity clothing bins or drop them off at a local Opportunity store. You can give unwanted items to friends. Clutter can be put into local recycling bins. Why not have a garage sale. Join forces with neighbours and have a combined sale. Leave it out on the nature strip for free collection by passing traffic. Have a burning ceremony to turn it into a novelty moment. What you don’t want to do is rearrange clutter to send it back into storage - just by repacking clutter - it’s still not fully dealt with. Bring closure and release yourself for good from clutter in your home.
Allow new energy to flow in your home - and remove clutter blocks in your life. I hope I’ve provided u with some constructive ideas to allow you to
put into place some changes to make in-roads to clearing clutter in your own home. Like I always say - Keep in happy places and Make your home nest a happy place that you’re proud of and enjoy being in.
Today auditory stimulation for The Global Good Soul Vibration Podcast was proudly brought to you by www.happyguru.com.
Duncan.
